Visiting the South Pole

One hundred years ago today, Roald Amundsen reached the south pole riding on a dogsled, eating pemmican, and wearing sealskins. But if you wanted to accomplish the same feat today, what would you ride, eat, and wear? To find out, we called modern-day south pole explorers Dixie Dansercour and Sam Deltour on their satellite phone—reaching them in the middle of the coldest, windiest, most desolate place on Earth.

Extreme How-To: Visiting the South Pole

Extreme How-To: Visiting the South Pole

When a person is resting in a tent in the middle of Antarctica, you'd expect him to be wearing a little more than just his underwear. But that's the situation Sam Deltour caught himself in just a few days ago. "I was just sitting here," he says, "Then I realized it was minus 14 degrees Celsius [7 degrees Fahrenheit] in the tent. It's weird because our bodies are adjusted."

Deltour, a medical student, is crossing Antarctica on skis pulled by giant kites with Dixie Dansercour, a veteran of extreme adventuring who makes polar trips twice a year. The two-person Belgian team is 23 days into a 100-day trip across the continent. Just like Amundsen's south pole party 100 years ago, they are completely autonomous, carrying with them everything they'll need for the journey, down to the last sheet of toilet paper. But precisely what they're carrying and how it's being transported shows just how much polar expeditions have changed in the last century.

Getting Out There

Getting Out There

Back in 1911, Amundsen, influenced by false reports that men had beaten him to the north pole, switched his goal to becoming the first person to plant a flag on the bottom of the world. Because British explorer Robert Falcon Scott was already headed there as part of a scientific expedition, it became a race.

A century later, Deltour and Dansercour are motivated not by extreme pride or competition, but by a passion for the icy, desolate beauty of Antarctica. "Being here keeps you awake. It strips you from all the luxuries you have at home that are just a little too much and a little oppressive," Dansercour says. "Being in the rough and raw pleases me; it forces me to question my existence on this world."

Although the pole has already been claimed, much of the southernmost continent remains unexplored. "This part of Antarctica is a region where no one has been up to now," says Stefan Maes, who coordinates the Belgian expedition. "We don't even have maps, just some satellite information. It's one of the last unknown territories on Earth."

Besides being home to the lowest recorded temperature on the planet (minus 128.6 degrees Fahrenheit at Russia's Vostok station near the south geomagnetic pole), Antarctica presents all kind of dangers to intrepid explorers, including massive crevasses and fields of sastrugi — grooves and ridges in the snow surface that make the going very tough. If you think you might be interested in a polar expedition, Danserceour says, "You should start by first asking yourself if you really want this. It's no use to suffer, suffer, suffer. If you have no eyes for the beauty, it would be a shame."